Havel - Responsibility and Identity 2

"For me the fundamental flaw in the many different positivistic 'explanations' lies in the fact that it reduces human responsibility - as it does everything else - to a mere relationship of something relative, transitory, and finite to something else relative, transitory, and finite (for example, the relationship of a citizen to the legal code, or of the unconscious to the 'superego').  By its very nature, however, such an understanding hides, and must hide, what is most important and, in my opinion, as clear as day: what we have here is not the mutual relationship of two relativities to each other, but the relationship of relativity to 'non-relativity,' the relationship of finiteness to 'infinity,' of a unique existence to the totality of Being.  It is true that responsibility usually finds expression as the relationship of something in us to something around us or something else in us, but essentially it is always a relationship between us, as 'relativity' - and our only genuine antithesis, that which alone permits us to experience our relativity as relativity; that is to an omnipresent, absolute horizon as the 'final instance' that lies behind everything and above everything, which as it were provides everything with a framework, a measure and a background and which ultimately qualifies and defines everything relative.  This superabstract and superimaginary horizon is, at the same time, something confoundedly concrete - for do we not experience it today and every day, through all our particular experiences of the world of relativities, as a constantly present limiting element, and in fact as a dimension that touches us most compellingly?"

"In other words, as an ability or a determination or a perceived duty of man to vouch for himself completely, absolutely, and in all circumstances (in other words, as the only true creator of freedom), human responsibility is precisely the agent by which one first defines oneself as a person vis-à-vis the universe, that is, as a miracle of Being that one is.  On the one hand, it is only thus that one defines and so infuses meaning into one's dependency on the world; on the other hand, it is only thus that one definitively separates oneself from the world as a sovereign and independent being; it is only thus that one, as it were, stands on one's own two feet.  I would say that responsibility for oneself is a knife we use to carve out our own inimitable features in the panorama of Being; it is the pen with which we write into the history of Being that story of fresh creation of the world that each new human existence always is."

"In short, it seems to me that just as there can be no matter without space, and no space without matter, their can be no transitory human existence without the horizon of permanence against which it develops and to which - whether it knows it or not - it constantly relates."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga